Zoë Fay-Stindt
Stop Being So Jealous of the Creatures
Rinse & repeat: get high on the mountain and slip
your way down its rocky vertebrae, counting lichens.
Slick with rain, down dog, let your long sob out.
Ooo! That one hurts, that one came from down deep.
Rinse the mold from the sausage, its slick tube
wicked in your hands, lonely soldier, and you relish it.
Enough. You’ve become a swallow now, nest-anchored.
And anyway, how could you think about bodies
with the worry of your mother’s probable death,
or your father’s new haircut like a breakup
over Zoom. That long braid you spent your life
using as a compass home. Outside your door,
check for snails with each step, casual murderer,
and come to daily prayer at the watering hole,
the pink tamarisk a wind-tousled feast
for all those devout attendees you don’t yet
have names for: the bees & scarabs, little green flies,
those spotted beetles and red bellies, all drunk
and tumbling into you when they come up for air.
And you are jealous of their gathering, of their bodies
clunking into each other, knocking elbows, each warm belly
pressing, briefly, into a neighbor’s willing back—no, hold on,
you’re anthropomorphizing again, this fantasy too easy
in quarantine, and if you are the bug how could you possibly
be that bird up there, cutting into the sky all day
before ducking back into her cave, two new lives
to feed, and the mud grateful to hold them, and the shingles
as orange as they’ve ever been, and there no sickness
between them but warmth, their bodies crowding in.
—Submitted on 05/14/2020
Zoë Fay-Stindt is a bicontinental poet with roots in both the French and American south. Her poems have appeared in fields, The Indianapolis Review, Winter Tangerine, Rust and Moth, The Floating Zo, and others journals.
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